Honolulu to implement cooling with deep-sea water

More than half of the buildings in
Honolulu’s skyscraper-studded
downtown will be cooled by
ocean water pumped from the
deep by 2012. The project should
save money for building owners,
and greenhouse gas emissions
should be cut, according to an
environmental impact state-
and sulfur oxides by 165 tons per the day, driven by air-condition-
year. It will also reduce the use of ing use, so this approach saves
refrigerants such as HCFC-22, not only power, but premium
HCFC-123, and CFC-11/500. power, notes Mikulina. “This
“Most green-energy projects project will help relieve some
focus on generating clean elec- strain on the power grid.”
trons,” says Jeff Mikulina, head of The system does not warm the
the Blue Planet Foundation, ocean, says the company’s vice-
president for engineering,

ment published in fall 2009.
The technology is already
used in Toronto and Stock-
holm to balance tempera-
tures inside large buildings,
notably to cool areas with
computer servers and tele-
phone exchanges during the
summer months. But, says
William M. Mahlum, presi-
dent of Honolulu Seawater
Air Conditioning LLC, which
is undertaking the $240 mil- Honolulu will soon become the first warm-climate
lion project, “This is the first city to use deep-sea water to cool part of its
time it will be used to cool a downtown.
warm-weather city center.” The
company, owned by investors in
Hawaii, Sweden, and Minnesota,
is managed by Renewable Energy
Innovations, a unit of Ever-Green
Energy Co. of St. Paul, Minn.
Groundbreaking is expected
next summer, and the first 40
buildings are expected to come
on-line in late 2012. Another five
will be added the following year
to reach maximum capacity of
28,000 tons.
Once the system is up and run-
ning, predicts Mahlum, it should
inspire tropical coastal cities
around the world to harness the
technology. “We know this could
work in Miami, Acapulco, and a
lot of other coastal cities,” he
says. “All you need is a steep
enough coastal gradient and con-
centrated demand.”
The system, he says, will save
its clients about 20% in cooling
costs. By reducing power use by
77 million kilowatt hours per year,
or 75%, it will cut CO2 emissions
by 84,000 tons, NOx by 169 tons,
which promotes clean energy.
“The beauty of this one is that it
avoids electrons altogether by
tapping into a vast local re-
source.”
In this system, a five-foot-wide
pipe extends four miles out to sea
to a depth of 1700 feet and brings
in 44,000 gallons per minute of
water at 45 °F. Once ashore, the
water goes through a convention-
ally powered chiller that brings its would take another five years.
temperature down to exactly 44
°F, then loops through a heat ex-
changer with a closed-circuit
freshwater system, and is released
back into the sea at a depth of
200 feet at 56 °Fsthe natural tem-
perature at that depth.
Meanwhile, the cooled freshwa-
ter makes its way to the buildings’ could be turned into electricity
air-conditioning units, and cools
air passing over the coils in front “not yet,” but as a sideline, the
of the fans. This allows the build- laboratory created the world’s
ing to turn off the energy-hungry
compressor that previously chilled
the coil and the cooling towers.
Hawaii sees a surge in the de-
mand for power in the middle of
CHRISTOPHER PALA
Ingvar Larsson. “If you look
at the heat we emit in both
the ocean and the atmo-
sphere, it’s 40% less than a
conventional air-condition-
ing system, and of course, by
cutting greenhouse gases, we
slow global warming.”
Peter Rosegg, a Hawaiian
Electric Company spokes-
man, has nothing but praise
for the project. “By reducing
our load, it allows [us] to
increase our reliability to
other customers,” he says.
“The next logical step would be
[to add] Waikiki, the tourism-ori-
ented part of the city, where 40%
of the power use is taken up by
air conditioning.”
Honolulu Seawater Air Condi-
tioning officials confirm that once
the current project is finished,
they expect to create another
unit, with its own pipe into the
ocean, in Waikiki; that project
It’s not surprising this came
about in Hawaii. On the Big Is-
land in 1974, the Natural Energy
Laboratory of Hawaii Authority
did the first U.S. tests of ocean
thermal energy conversion to see
if temperature differences be-
tween the deep and the surface
economically. The answer was
first air-conditioning system to
use cold seawater pumped in
from the deep.
—CHRISTOPHER PALA

10.1021/es9033364  XXXX American Chemical Society MONTH ##, XXXX / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 A